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Christology in the Aquarian Age

A gospel is by definition a statement of some sort concerning Jesus Christ, or, as the title of this one specifies, “Jesus the Christ,” implying that Jesus is one thing, Christ another. Jesus the Christ would mean, and be, Jesus the Anointed One. Jesus who bears a peculiar dignity and responsibility. The New Testament Christians heaped titles upon him, calling him not only the Christ, but also the Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Logos, even God. Any such title, together with its implications, creates a Christology, a doctrine or an understanding of Jesus. And in this chapter I want to reconstruct the Aquarian understanding of Jesus as the Christ. Levi’s text does not spell it out in a systematic way, but there are a number of pretty explicit statements that enable us to fill out a colorful picture. It is important first to grasp that the theology of Levi Dowling is derived from, or at least closely parallels, that of the New Thought movement which began as one of several “mind over matter” movements in the nineteenth century, born from the same womb as Christian Science, the brainchild of Phineas Parker Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy. It gave rise to religious organizations including the Unity School of Christianity and the Church of Religious Science.

At the base of all these variations was a common “Panentheistic” theology. This philosophy, one major step removed from Pantheism, posits that all is God, and one with God. Unlike Monism (non-dualism), for both Pantheism and Panentheism the infinite variety of things, objects, and people in the world are all quite real, and by no means illusions, unlike the verdict rendered by Monists, for whom all apparent diversity is illusory and serves only to mask the Divine from our unenlightened eyes. No, for Pantheists and Panentheists, all things are real, but their reality is that of God. All things are not masks obscuring God but rather faces revealing him. The trick is to recognize God in all those manifestations. The difference between Pantheism (such as that of the ancient Stoics or of Spinoza) and Panentheists (such as Kabbalists, Qualified Nondualist [Visistadvaita Vedanta] Hindus, and today’s Process theologians) is that, for the former, there simply is no personal deity. The Godhead is infinite and beyond definition. It cannot exist over against other realities, for there can be none. For the latter, it is not difficult to imagine that one of the many forms into which the divine essence has poured Itself is that of a personal deity over and above the world. Panentheists tend to think of God as the soul of the world and the world as the body of God.

The New Thought movement seems to teeter between Pantheism and Panentheism, and occasionally even toward Monism. This last is when they borrow an element from Christian Science, trying be healed of disease by reminding themselves that they are really God, and God cannot be sick. That surely implies that illness symptoms are illusions incompatible with divinity. Again, often New Thought people lean in the direction of Pantheism, speaking of the cosmos as a system of spiritual and natural laws, a kind of Logos-structure, that one may manipulate in one’s favor. This one may do by realizing and asserting one’s own divine nature. From there on in, whether or not one is a Panentheist depends largely on whether one wishes to retain personalistic prayer and worship, keeping one foot in traditional orthodox Theism. One need not condemn all this as inconsistent. It would be better to say it is a case of a living reality (New Thought spirituality) that is too large and lively to be neatly deposited into a single box. Life is larger than the categories in which we would prefer to capture it.

As Levi Dowling depicts him, Jesus was a paradigm case of the God-man unity that exists, at least latently, in every human being. The difference between Jesus and the run of mankind is that he awakened to his divine character and began to draw upon the power to which it entitled him. The self-imposed limitations of unbelief and of low, worldly expectations stifle any expression of the inherent divinity in the rest of us. What Jesus was, we all can be, will be.

The Christological framework here is essentially that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of Liberal theology, who insisted that, to have been truly incarnate, truly human, Jesus must have possessed and exercised divinity in a manner entirely compatible with his genuine humanity. Thus he cannot have owed his exceptional power and wisdom to an infusion of divinity that would have rendered him some sort of Superman. That would make him a mythical demigod, and nothing for us realistically to aspire to. Jesus “was God incarnate” in the sense that he was filled with God-consciousness,⁴ ever mindful of his divine source and nature. Everyone could be this way, but all allow themselves to become preoccupied with worldly matters. In one sense Jesus was not unique: others can do what he did. In another sense, he was unique, not merely a way-shower. He became a living force, by virtue of the passing on of his gospel portrait preached in church. The preaching of Jesus as he appears in the gospel, in the atmosphere of the Christian community, enkindles in the believer an experience like that of Jesus himself, at least to some increased degree. So Jesus is the Redeemer as well as our example. It is a subtle and impressive Christology. It should be no surprise to find the same outlines in The Aquarian Gospel since New Thought, from which it draws, was itself inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists, and they were in turn the American children of Schleiermacher.

The Aquarian Christ admits that his power is great, but in the very next breath he diverts attention from himself to his hearers, who may reflect him as he reflects God, if only they will: “What I have done all men can do, and what I am all men shall be” (178:46). Before the cross, he announces, “What I have done all men can do. And I am now about to demonstrate the power of man to conquer death; for every man is God made flesh” (163:36-37). See also 176:19, where the Risen Jesus issues the Aquarian version of the Great Commission: “I go my way, but you shall go to all the world and preach the gospel of the omnipotence of men, the power of truth, the resurrection of the dead.”

Jesus, as Jesus, deserves no worship at all. Like numerous New Testament characters, he repudiates the very idea, here in the course of a denunciation of Hindu idolatry. Chapter 26 finds the pilgrim Jesus watching the approach of one of the great ritual vehicles transporting an image of the god Krishna, or Jagganath.⁵ (We derive our word “juggernaut,” an unstoppable engine of destruction, from these huge-wheeled wagons, beneath the wheels of which fanatical worshippers used to throw themselves as sacrifices.)

One day a car of Jagganath was hauled

along by scores of frenzied men,

and Jesus said, “Behold, a form

without a spirit passes by;

a body with no soul;

a temple with no altar fires.

This car of Krishna is an empty thing,

for Krishna is not there.

This car is but an idol of

a people drunk on wine of carnal things.

God lives not in the noise of tongues;

there is no way to him from any idol shrine.

God’s meeting place with man is in the heart,

and in a still small voice he speaks;

and he who hears is still.”

And all the people said, “Teach us

to know the Holy One who speaks

within the heart, God of the still small voice.”

And Jesus said, “The Holy Breath

cannot be seen with mortal eyes;

nor can men see the Spirits of

the Holy One; but in their image man

was made, and he who looks into the face

of man, looks at the image of the God

who speaks within. And when

man honors man he honors God,

And what man does for man, he does

for God. And you must bear in mind

that when man harms in thought, or word

or deed another man, he does

a wrong to God. If you would serve

the God who speaks within the heart,

just serve your near of kin, and those

that are no kin, the stranger at your gates,

the foe who seeks to do you harm;

assist the poor, and help the weak;

do harm to none, and covet not

what is not yours. Then, with your tongue

the Holy One will speak; and he

will smile behind your tears, will light

your countenance with joy, and fill

your hearts with peace.”

And then the people asked.

“To whom shall we bring gifts?

Where shall we offer sacrifice?”

And Jesus said, “Our Father-God

asks not for needless waste of plant,

of grain, of dove, of lamb.

That which you burn on any shrine

you throw away. No blessings can

attend the one who takes the food

from hungry mouths to be destroyed by fire.

When you would offer sacrifice

unto our God, just take your gift

of grain, or meat and lay it on

the table of the poor. From it

an incense will arise to heaven,

which will return to you with blessedness.

Tear down your idols; they can hear you not;

turn all your sacrificial altars into fuel for flames.

Make human hearts your altars, burn

your sacrifices with the fire of love.”

And all the people were entranced,

and would have worshiped Jesus as a God;

but Jesus said, “I am your brother man

just come to show the way to God;

you shall not worship man; praise God, the Holy One.”

Here is a fine specimen of the same rationalist ridicule of idolatry we find in the Second Isaiah (Isaiah 44:9-20). It is, of course, a rationalism that stops short of turning its guns on religion per se as a superstition. In short, it is the religious rationalism of the Deists and Natural Religionists which have influenced Levi Dowling at other points, too. That Enlightenment piety shows itself as well in the disdain for wasting money on religious mummery that could have been spent for the poor, even though this point clashes with the canonical gospels (Mark 14:3-9).

Even miracles are not, as in traditional apologetics, signs pointing to the glory of Christ himself, but only to that to which Jesus himself points: “He was transfigured that the men of earth might see the possibilities of man” (129:14).

The Method and the Messiah

How did Jesus attain unto his exalted office as the revelation of divine humanity? It is important to know, for, in the nature of the case, the rest of us must do the same thing if we wish to gain the same goal.

The greatest mystery of all times

lies in the way that Christ lives in the heart.

Christ cannot live in clammy dens

of carnal things. The seven battles

must be fought, the seven victories

won before the carnal things,

like fear, and self, emotions and

desire, are put away. When this

is done the Christ will take posses-

sion of the soul; the work is done,

and man and God are one. (59:10-12)

These words remind us of a similar passage from another modern gospel, perhaps the greatest of them, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ:

Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks. This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles—to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained.⁶

The Gospel speaks typically of the Christ potential in every person:

And Jesus said,

“I cannot show the king, unless

you see with eyes of soul, because

the kingdom of the king is in the soul.

And every soul a kingdom is.

There is a king for every man.

This king is love, and when this love

becomes the greatest power in life,

it is the Christ; so Christ is king.

And every one may have this Christ

dwell in his soul, as Christ dwells in

my soul.” (71:4-7.)

“And when he rises to the plane

of Christine consciousness, he knows

that he himself is king, is love, is Christ,

and so is son of God.” (71:16)

The emphasis is off of Jesus Christ in this gospel and on the reader, since Jesus came to initiate humanity as a whole into Christhood. “Christ” means “the Anointed,” but in this work it has come to mean “the Anointing.” Anyone can receive it, and thus anyone can become the, or a, Christ.

Jesus comes to bring the sav-

iour of the world to men;

Love is the saviour of the world.

And all who put their trust in Christ,

and follow Jesus as a pat-

tern and a guide, have everlasting life. (79:16-17)

Such occasional seeming demotions of Jesus from the focus of Christian worship means not to denigrate Jesus but rather to regain the focus on Jesus’ desire to pass the anointing on to us. “Christ is not a man. The Christ is universal love, and Love is king” (68:11).

Again,

“I am the lamp; Christ is the oil

of life; the Holy Breath the fire.

Behold the light! and he who fol-

lows me shall not walk in the dark,

but he shall have the light of life” (135:4).

Jesus is the bearer of the anointing, and he bears it for others. He is rather like the candle flame in the Buddhist parable which seeks to illustrate reincarnation as the sequential lighting of each candle in a series by the flame of the one before it. “I am the candle of the Lord aflame to light the way” (72:31). Jesus can even speak of himself in terms suggesting he senses the presence of the Christ as a distinct entity within him, the “sin” of the old Nestorian Christology:

“He who believes in me and in

the Christ whom God has sent,

may drink the cup of life, and from

his inner parts shall streams of li-

ving waters flow” (134:3).

His disciple Martha already understood this, that Jesus was not identical with that which he modeled: “And Martha said, ‘Lord, I believe that you are come to manifest the Christ of God’” (148:19, rewriting John 11:27).

The Aquarian Jesus is made to speak with the bitter wisdom of twentieth-century hindsight when he predicts what will happen in his name because people will have misunderstood his role as central, not as instrumental: “because of me, the earth will be baptized in human blood” (113:14b; cf. Luke 12:49). But perhaps it is not the fault of poor mankind. Perhaps it must recoil from the revelation: “Behold, the light may be so bright that men cannot see anything” (107:18).

The Aquarian Christology might be Pantheistic, given all these statements, but does it go far enough for us to be able to classify it under the rubric of New Thought? Indeed it does. We do find occasional boasts that, being one with Divine Reason and realizing it, one can move mountains at a word: “The greatest power in heaven and earth is thought” (84:22-28). Not faith, as in Mark 12:22-24, but thought. And there is the New Thought emphasis on wishing a thing and exercising divine power to get it, which strikes some as magical: “What he wills to gain he has the power to gain” (14:11).

If God is within us, so are heaven and hell:

My brother, man, your thoughts are wrong;

your heaven is not far away;

and it is not a place of metes and bounds,

is not a country to be reached;

it is a state of mind.

God never made a heav’n for man;

he never made a hell; we are

creators and we make our own.

Now, cease to seek for heaven in the sky;

just open up the windows of your hearts,

and, like a flood of light, a heaven will come

and bring a boundless joy;

then toil will be no cruel task. (33:8-10)

The devil is the greatest power in

our land, and though a myth, he dan-

dles on his knee both youth and age. (56:20)

At one juncture (34:4), when Jesus is sojourning among the Buddhists, and correcting them on a point or two, an interesting question arises, seemingly inevitably: Is Jesus the Buddha come again? “The priests and all the people were astounded at his words and said, ‘Is this not Buddha come again in flesh? No other one could speak with such simplicity and power’” (cf. Matthew 12:23; John 3:2). Of course, the implied answer is both yes and no. He is not Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha of the sixth century BCE, but he is one of that one’s successors, one of the pan-historical chain of Enlightened Ones. He need not be the same man reincarnated. The point is that no one individual need be the focus of Enlightenment—as if, without him coming back, we should be bereft of Enlightenment. If you or I were to give full vent to the Christ-potential we contain, we, too, should be Buddhas, at least Bodhisattvas, ourselves.

Etheric Ethics

One cannot really imagine a gospel without ethics, and, so to speak, plenty of them. After all, many people, hearing the word “gospel,” probably think at once: “Sermon on the Mount” and maybe nothing more.

One thing we seldom find in the traditional gospels is metaethics, the prior thinking on the presuppositions on the basis of which we decide the morality of specific issues. We are used to referring to this lack euphemistically, as if it were a virtue for Jesus to have simply issued moral demands with no thought of an underlying system which we might propound in order to decide new questions on the same principles. By contrast, it is to the credit of our Aquarian evangelist that he has provided an important glimpse of his Jesus’ moral calculus:

When men defy their consciences

and listen not to what they say,

the heart is grieved and they become

unfitted for the work of life;

and thus they sin. The conscience may

be taught. One man may do in con-

science what another cannot do.

What is a sin for me to do

may not be sin for you to do.

The place you occupy upon

the way of life determines what is sin.

There is no changeless law of good;

for good and evil both are judged

by other things. One man may fast

and in his deep sincerity

of heart is blest. Another man

may fast and in the faithlessness

of such a task imposed is cursed.

You cannot make a bed to fit

the form of every man. If you

can make a bed to fit yourself

you have done well. (119:19-22)

We catch, I believe, a hint of Aristotelian-style moral relativism whereby a broader principle is ever tailored to the individual’s particular abilities, needs, and options. The immediate inspiration for the passage may have been Romans chapter 14.

At the same time, there appear to be some absolutes on which Jesus Aquarius is not willing to budge. At 74:24, we are enjoined to practice the Hindu-Jainist ethic of ahimsa, or non-harm.

Whoever is not kind to every form of life –

to man, to beast, to bird, and creeping thing –

cannot expect the blessings of the Holy One;

for as we give, so God will give to us.

One wonders how the evangelist proposed to square this practice with the flexibility he allowed in the just-mentioned case of food. Surely it cannot be a private option whether or not to devour meat if I must already have sworn off shedding the blood of my animal cousins.

But we may in the last analysis leave such calculations to karma. Justice will be served. Good and bad karma alike shall be accrued, and the Universe itself shall know how to value each good or bad deed, doling out reward or punishment accordingly. God need not trouble his wise head figuring out who was naughty or nice and designing his list accordingly. The calculations are run unthinkingly by the innate machinery of the universe. Chapter 114 sets forth the doctrine of karma and theodicy. Poor mortals are tempted to despair of justice in the world, chafing at their own fates or those of others. We accuse God or life or the world of being unfair. Jesus laments such worm’s-eye-view sentiments. How sad that only he can behold the Big Picture, the record of past incarnations passing unremembered like water under a bridge. If we could steal a glance at the scandals of the past, or the virtues, we should rest satisfied with the verdicts being meted out in this present life. For a man’s life does not consist in the number of years he amasses in a single lifetime.

I believe I see in 105:28-32 a passage advocating good, honest Nietzscheanism: admit your hate rather than hiding it behind a pathetic tissue of phony forgiveness! Sin boldly! It’s not the worst thing you could do!

You men, do not deceive yourselves

in thought; your hearts are known;

Hypocrisy will blight a soul

as surely as the breath of Beel-ze-bub.

An honest evil man is more esteemed

by guardians of the soul than a

dishonest pious man. If you would curse

the son of man, just curse him out aloud.

A curse is poison to the inner man,

and if you hold and swallow down a curse

it never will digest; lo, it

will poison every atom of your soul.

And if you sin against a son of man,

you may be pardoned and your guilt be cleansed

by acts of kindness and of love;

Levi the evangelist seems to want to exonerate Christianity from Nietzsche’s accusations that it promotes a pathetically hypocritical slave morality in which a seemingly noble willingness to forgive merely masks one’s well-nursed ressentiment. “Oh I’ll forgive you all right, buddy! But when the Son of Man comes, he’s going to kick your butt!”

Rather than the sentimental/radical assumption that the poor are the pious saints of Yahve, such as we find everywhere in the gospels, The Aquarian Gospel takes a more hard-nosed position. Poverty is no sure sign of piety.

It is no sign that man is good

and pure because he lives in want.

The listless, shiftless vagabonds

of earth are mostly poor and have to beg

for bread. (62:18-19)

On the other hand, such squinting at the poor certainly fits this gospel’s sense of karmic comeuppance. Would the casual observer not be justified in inferring that the indigent man has himself to blame, if not for being a lazy bum in this present life, then for doing something wrong in a previous life for which his present poverty is recompense?

If Jesus’ (Levi’s) enthusiasm for the poor is a bit restrained, he displays in no uncertain terms the classic liberal conscience based on both the fallacy of the “limited good” and on survivor guilt. “How could I seek for pleasure for myself while others are in want?” (51:16). As to the “limited good,” it is the same belief that leads to the idealization of the poor. There being only so much of any good commodity to go around, the rich must have gained their goods by depriving the poor of theirs. While in ancient times this may have been true, it has long ago become a phantom and a fantasy, ever since Capitalism made it possible to expand the pie, no longer to have to cut thinner and thinner slices of it. As to survivor guilt, or “bleeding heart” liberalism, like that of Father Paneloux in Camus’s The Plague, it stems directly from our feeling of unworthiness to have avoided the arbitrary blows which struck those to either side of us. Why did we survive when so many others became glowing shadows at Hiroshima?⁷ Why are we prosperous when other nations are not? We must have exploited them. And so on. Purely as an exercise in ascetical pietism, we seek to atone for our success by renouncing it, or by feeling guilty for keeping it. We vow never to enjoy life till everyone can, oblivious of the fact that our misery, self-imposed, can never lift another out of his. We cannot get sick enough that it will heal another, poor enough that it will lift another out of poverty. It is really too bad that Jesus/Levi falls prey to this way of thinking, as it is the mirror image of the very same ressentiment that broods and seethes rather than acting. How so? Well, if the rich person feels guilty for being rich, he could renounce his wealth as Francis of Assisi did (though the real poor, those who did not choose it as a penance, would mock him as a fool). At least when the vaguely-imagined judgment struck all the rich and exalted all the poor, he would be guaranteed safety. But our hero lacks the guts to do that, just as Nietzsche’s Christian coward turns the other cheek only because he lacks the courage to hate and to strike back. Likewise, the conscience-stricken liberal is content to simmer with self-hatred while continuing guiltily to enjoy what he neurotically thinks he has no right to.

In any ancient Jewish context such as an historical Jesus might be placed, the question of ethics could not have been raised without connection to the Torah of Moses. In the canonical gospels the issues of Torah-observance and Jewish customs come up constantly. We see a running battle between Jesus and the scribes over whether his followers are living in accord with the Torah. Some of these stories seem to reflect disputes among Jewish Christians who did mean to keep the Law but interpreted its stipulations differently from their critics. Others appear to stem from Hellenistic or Gentile churches which sought in Jesus license to ignore the mores of an alien (to them) culture, that of Judaism. It is hard to tell which opinion an historical Jesus might have espoused. But the issue was still alive in the age when the gospels were written. Things have changed completely by the time Levi Dowling wrote The Aquarian Gospel. Outside of the Seventh Day Adventist sect, no Protestants took the notion of Christians keeping Torah rules seriously enough to debate it. Most Protestant interpreters simply assumed that Jesus rejected and flouted the Torah, anticipating the Pauline polemic against it. For Jesus Aquarius, the Law of Moses, or any other, is a museum relic. “If one is full of love he does not need commands of any kind” (17:7). This saying is perhaps suggested by St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love God and do as you will.” But it goes farther than the pinched-faced saint could imagine, all the way to Rudolf Bultmann’s pneumatic antinomianism.⁸ Any fan of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ would, a few decades later, have felt right at home in the pages of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics with its dictum, “Love only is always good.”⁹

Such an ethic sits loose to legal formulations and is thus very far removed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics, an ethics of duty and the keeping of moral absolutes. But there is a major element of Kant’s approach that finds a ringing echo in the pages of our Gospel according to Levi: acting for the sake of duty and not merely in accordance with it. “And when you sow, sow seeds of right, because it is the right, and not in the way of trade, expecting rich rewards” (100:12). In this Kant would rejoice. It mirrors his distinction between mere hypothetical imperatives (prudent considerations if one wants to achieve some goal) and truly moral categorical imperatives, obeyed despite any costs, simply for the sake of one’s duty, because a thing is right.